In some ways The Silver Turk is for the Cybermen what Jubilee was for the Daleks-- there's a lone Cyberman on Earth, confused and tortured, and while the Doctor distrusts it, his companion feels compassion for it. The Silver Turk never hits that strand quite as hard as Jubilee, but both Marc Platt's writing and Nicholas Briggs's performance make all the Cybermen into interesting-- dare I say it-- characters. It's not so much that you feel sorry for the guys (though you do sometimes), as that they act like people with motivations, and not monsters doing monster things.

The Silver Turk is nice stuff all around, a collision of ideas and plot and visuals in the way the best Doctor Who always should. It's a new fresh start for the eighth Doctor, but even apart from that, it's just a solid Doctor Who adventure.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

This is an excellent start for the new team. The two pitch up in Vienna in 1873, where mysterious murders are taking place and a showman is demonstrating the marvellous Silver Turk, a metal humanoid that can play musical instruments and also chess. The cover picture makes it pretty clear that the Turk is in fact not merely a Cyberman but one of the original Mondas Cybermen from The Tenth Planet, and knowing that author Marc Platt had previously written what I still think is the best ever Big Finish audio, Spare Parts, which tells the story of the origin of the Cybermen on Mondas, I rather hoped we might be in for a treat.

And we are. Platt (who I think is the only writer for the classic series still contributing to any of the lines of Who) is always an intricate writer and sometimes over-reaches himself. But here he skilfully interrogates the relationship between the Cybermen and Frankenstein, not only Shelley's original novel but also the film versions (and there's a nod to King Kong as well). Platt (and Mary Shelley, as more-or-less viewpoint character) is actually rather sympathetic to the stranded Cybermen, who none the less are fundamentally inhuman; there is a brilliant scene in a church between the excellent Julie Cox as Mary Shelley and Nick Briggs as the stranded Gram (and generally the soundscape is pretty good). This is the best Cybermen story since Spare Parts (which itself is the best Cybermen story ever). ( )